I got up early this morning and drove north to Gunnison Gorge National Conservation Area. It took awhile to get to the place I wanted, as nothing seemed to be clearly marked. On the other hand, I didn't see a single other person the entire run, so that was an upshot. I parked my car just off the main road, then started running up Dinosaur Rd, which was a 4x4 jeep trail through badlands. My Forester definitely wouldn't have made it, and my legs had some problems too, as I had to walk a lot of the uphills. Finally I got to the ridge and ran south on the ridgeline trail. Sweet views of the gorge, but the single-track proved to be very tough too, to the point of walking some uphills again. Once I got to a real trailhead, I looked at a more detailed map and realized that I wanted to be a different trail, so then I backtracked north to where I started on the single-track, and then kept going north a couple more miles on the ridge trail until I got to the Ute Trail trailhead. This was where I wanted to be. Once on the Ute trail, I descended from about 6300 ft down to the Gunnison River at 5300 ft over a little less than 4 miles. I finally got the river just as it was time to turn around. It was beautiful and well worth the effort. It was getting pretty warm by this point and I had gone through half my water, so I jumped in the ice-cold river to cool off and get all my clothes good and soaked for the return trip up out of the gorge. I could have stayed there on that beach all day, but I had things to do. Like write this blog. And work.
Running out of the gorge wasn't too bad, and the gradient in most stretches was quite manageable and even fun for running. I managed to average sub-9:00 out of the gorge and got a good workout in doing so. Not much walking here, just a little. Once I was on top of the ridge, I got on Ute Road and descended down about 2.5 miles out of the NCA. Pretty steep downhill here, and I was doing about 7-minute pace. Finally I got to the "main" road and had to run about 1.5 miles south back to my car at Dinosaur Road. Averaged about 6:15/mile pace on this last rolling gravel section. It was a good run, but I'm glad to be done. I'm beat. 9:22/mile average pace for the entire run.
Kind of a quasi Big Workout today. A lot of distance and a fair amount of effort, but not as controlled and formal as my normal workouts. That's probably a good thing, as it provides a mental break. I'm using this week mainly to build mileage, and most of my speed focus is being put on my Big Workout this Saturday. (Cascadia: 314 miles) | 